Sideways
by Penguins Stealing My Sanity
Summary: Hawkeye deals with stress in his own way, by looking at the world from a whole new perspective.


Implied Hawk/BJ, but that's mostly negligible.

**-Sideways-**

We'd loaned Charles out to the 8063rd, which meant the Swamp was peaceful and, as Charles himself would say, "conducive to an amicable atmosphere." At least, that's how it _had_ been, up until this morning. BJ was in Post-Op now, and I was drowning myself in shitty gin, trying to forget the look in Corporal Hancock's eyes before he started seizing, trying not to imagine what he must have been thinking—how he must have trusted me to bring him through it, trusted me not to fail him…

I shoved my fingers into my eyes and mumbled a few swear words to make myself feel better, and stumbled over to the still to top off my glass with the blessed, numbing swill. I'd learned from long experience that if you drank enough of the stuff, you could wipe away any memory you wanted to, and I was working towards those ends. My bladder chose that moment to make its needs known. I was making my way out of the Swamp, still clutching my martini glass, when the world started lurching crazily beneath my feet, and I found myself kissing the ground outside the door. Odd. I didn't think I was _quite_ that drunk. Oh well—the ground was nice enough, as far as places go. A little hard, but the human body could adapt amazingly well to any situation. The only truly unfortunate circumstance of my new and very dear friendship with the ground was that my glass had shattered at our meeting, and my sweet nectar of life had spilled all over said new friend. I wasn't to the point yet where licking the gin up was more than just a passing fancy, so I closed my eyes and said goodnight to my friend.

"Hawk? Hawkeye, are you all right?"

BJ started to pull me up by my shoulders, but I batted his hands away, and he dropped me back onto the ground with a soft thud. Not a very nice noise, that sort of thud. It almost reminded one of the sound a body would likely make after being shot, and once that thought had burrowed into one's mind, one's mind was apt to return to certain things one had been trying to forget. "Can't you see I'm sleeping?"

"You're drunk." Was that a note of disdain in his voice? Good old righteous BJ, always ready to ruin my fun if he wasn't a part of it.

"Same thing."

He sighed and stepped over me into the Swamp. I turned my head and cracked an eye open to look out at the dawn-lit camp. Laying on the ground provided a very unique perspective, and I wondered fleetingly why I had never tried it before. Things made more sense sideways. Life was easier to face side-on.

The door opened again, and BJ lowered himself into his chair. If I twisted my head a little, I could see him, sitting there in his bathrobe, legs stretched out with crossed ankles, hands clasped over his stomach. And he was looking at me with those eyes at seemed to see everything—eyes that, at present, looked disturbingly similar to Corporal Hancock's eyes. I looked away.

Nurse Able passed by, walking slowly and staring. I stared back.

"Hawkeye, what's wrong?" BJ asked, his voice gentle and fatherly. It had always seemed slightly ridiculous to me, BJ being a father. He was still only a kid himself.

"Is something wrong?" I asked, slightly surprised. Surprised enough to lift my head a little and let my eyes rove around.

"You're laying on the ground."

"Yes." I hoped the _Your point…?_ was clearly implied in my voice.

"_Why_?"

Silly BJ. "Why not?"

He was silent for a little while, and I closed my eyes again, thinking I might get a little more sleep. But then: "Is this about Hancock?" My whole body went stiff, and the ground suddenly wasn't as soft as it had been a few moments ago. "Hawk, there wasn't anything you could've done—"

"Shut up, Beej, and just let me be miserable, will you?"

Silence again, and then the chair creaked slightly as he got up. I thought he was going back into the Swamp, but then my view of the camp was blocked by a BJ about two feet from my face. I blinked at him. "Hullo."

He smiled. "Hi." He shifted his shoulders against the ground, grimacing as he made a small cloud of dust. "Not exactly the most comfortable spot to lay."

"You always have to have something to complain about. _You_, BJ Hunnicut, are a first-class complainer."

"And you, Benjamin Franklin Pierce—" He grinned at the death-glare I gave him. "—are a first-class drunk."

"I'd toast you if I had a drink."

"Captains…" I rolled my head onto my chin to look up at Radar, and BJ rolled onto his side to gain his own vantage. We both waited expectantly. Radar blinked a few times, shuffling his feet uncertainly, leafing through the papers on his clipboard. Finally he asked, "If I, uh, if I may ask, sirs …what're you doing?"

"Osmosis," I explained. "I spilled some gin, and I want it back."

"Oh, well good luck with that, sir."

"What is it, Radar?" BJ asked, shooting a grin at me.

"Major Houlihan asked me to come find you and tell you to come to Post-Op."

"Dammit, what now?" BJ heaved himself up to his feet and went dashing off.

I coughed slightly in the dust left by his boots, and when he was out of sight I let my head flop back onto the ground. Radar cleared his throat softly. "Yes, dear?"

"Really, Hawkeye, why are you layin' on the ground?"

There was a piece of fluff about an inch from my nose, and I blew it; it swirled up into the air, floated around, and landed back where it had started. For some inexplicable reason, that pissed the hell out of me, and I shouted at Radar, "Why does it have to be such a big deal if a man wants to lay outside his own _tent_?"

The scuffed boots took a few steps back. "Gee, sir—I was just askin' is all, 'cause—because it's _you_, and you're layin' on the ground!"

"Radar, bring your voice back into human range before we have half the dogs in Korea on our hands!"

He huffed wordlessly and stomped dramatically away. Yes, the world should certainly be tilted sideways—it was much more interesting to watch people walk away. With nothing more to keep my eyes open, I let them slide shut.

"Pierce! Hunnicut!"

My eyes opened of their own accord, and I looked up at Colonel Potter. "Ah, Colonel. Come to join the fun?" I rotated my head to look at BJ, once again laying next to me. "When did you get here?"

"A few minutes ago. You make the ground look comfortable enough that I thought I'd give it another try."

"Boys!"

We both looked up at Potter and asked in unison, "Yes?"

"What in the name of Becky's bloomers d'you two think you're doing?"

"Why does everyone keep asking me that?" I asked BJ.

"Maybe they think you know the answer," he suggested.

"Why would they think that?"

"Pierce, I _command_ you to tell me _why_ you're laying on the ground!"

"Is it a crime to sleep now, Colonel?" I asked, and was surprised to hear a little bitterness creeping into my voice. "Can't a man sleep where he wants anymore? I thought that was one of the freedoms we came here to protect."

Potter sighed, twisted his face around a little, and then crouched down in front of me. "Listen, Hawkeye—people here look up to you. They look to you to see how they should react to something—not me, _you_. I know you're only human, and you've had a tough week…but when people see you just laying here…it's bad for morale, Hawkeye."

"Colonel, I'm just trying to sleep. I worked—what?—53 hours straight, and lost a patient who's come through here _four times_ before today. I've patched him up every time, and sent him right back—and it killed him."

Potter and BJ said almost at the same time, "Hawkeye—"

"No! Don't tell me it's not my fault! It _is_! It just _is_! I could've sent him home, but he said he wanted to go back to the front—and he was so young, so…alive… All he wanted to do was fight—all he knew how to do—and I let him go… And now he's dead! _Because of me!_ So don't tell me it's not my fault! I did it—I caused him to die." I snarfed up the snot trying to mingle with the dirt below me, and twisted an arm around to rub at my face. "So just let me feel terrible about myself for a few more hours, and then we can all go back to pretending anything in this hellhole is normal."

After a little while, BJ reached out and gently rubbed my shoulder. Potter was very still, and then he rose slowly. "All right, Hawkeye. You take your time. Fighting's cooled down for a bit right now, so we probably won't get any new patients for a while." He paused, and just before he turned and walked away, added, "You're doing a fine job, son. Damn fine job."

BJ's hand stayed on my shoulder for a while, and I wasn't about to tell him to move it. I didn't feel like I had the energy to even open my mouth.

"When was the last time you ate, Hawk?" BJ asked softly.

"When did I leave the U.S.?"

"You should eat something."

" 'Something' being the important word there, Beej."

He sighed, but I could see the faint smile on his lips. "Are you hungry?"

"No, Mother."

"I'll go get you something, then."

I tried to insist I wasn't hungry, and certainly not for what passed for "food" around here, but BJ wouldn't stop pestering me until I delicately forked some of the mystery meat into my mouth. Just the thing to match my mood. "How do you feel?" he asked after I finally pushed the tray away before I threw the food back up. Though digestion would probably make it look more appetizing.

"Like I've been shoved through a meat grinder, strung between two oxen walking in the opposite directions, pounded into the dirt, and spit on."

"You need to sleep."

"That's what I've been trying to do, but I keep getting interrupted."

"Maybe if you moved inside…"

"No."

"No?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I like it out here. It makes me feel like I'm connected…like I'm a part of something bigger than all this, something I can't see yet. It almost feels like all the suffering over here, all the blood and cruelty, just might be worth something."

"You're waxing poetic, Hawk."

"Bring me a martini, and I'll show you what else I can wax."

"Hawkeye, go to sleep. I'll make sure no one else bothers you."

So I listened to Mother Hen and drifted back to sleep. I'd wake up every once in a while to hear BJ quietly explaining my temporarily increased eccentricity to whoever'd asked; and once, and indeterminable time after the sun had gone down, I woke to find BJ gently tucking a blanket around me. "Beej…?"

He rested his hand briefly on my hair. "It's getting cold. Go back to sleep."

"Beej, wait—" He'd started to rise, but stopped halfway between standing and crouching, which looked anything but comfortable. "You wanna have a sleepover?"

He smiled, a flash of pure white in the darkness, a beacon of hope among all the despair, a single lighthouse to bolster hopeless sailors. "Sure, Hawk. Just let me grab a blanket."

I would have suggested that I had a blanket right here that was plenty big for the both of us, but he'd already gone back into the Swamp. When he came back he dropped my pillow on my head, and I arranged it under my head while he stretched himself out on the ground next to me, laying on his back and tucking his arms behind his head. I watched him from my sideways perspective, studied the faint smile on his lips, the reflections of the thousand tiny stars in the pool of his eyes.

I flipped myself over onto my back, and let my eyes rove around the dark blue sky. There were no clouds, and the moon was no more than a tiny sliver to our left. "Dad used to take me out on clear nights like this, and we'd go lay up on a nice little hill and he'd tell me about all the constellations. We'd lay outside for hours, just watching the stars." I paused. "I don't think I ever told him how much I looked forward to those nights."

He turned onto his side and propped himself up on his elbow, still gazing upwards, as though he could touch the stars if he just got a little closer. "We never had many stars in California. Too many lights. I don't think I ever saw this many stars in my life before coming over here. I always feel like I'm in a different world, looking up at a different sky."

I scanned the heavens, and pointed. "There's the North Star."

"That way's East, Hawk."

"Oh…then _there's_ the North Star."

"It looks nice."

"Peaceful," I agreed. An absolutely comfortable silence spanned the slight distance between us until I rolled onto my side to face him, tucking my arm between the pillow and my head. "Beej…do you ever feel like the world just…stops, sometimes?"

"Yeah," he said, turning his eyes from the stars to me and smiling, that smile I'd only ever seen him give to me. "I think I've been feeling that a lot lately."

"Me too. There're times…times when I wish the world would just stop, and never start again."

He reached out and wrapped my hand in his, lifted my fingers up to his lips. "Me too." Everything we didn't say, all the words we couldn't speak aloud, not even in the darkest night, were in our eyes. Spoken, but unsaid.

At the beginning of the day, I hadn't thought sideways was any different from upways or longways or whatever other ways you wanted. At the beginning of the day, sideways had been nothing more than a fleeting glimpse when I woke up and went to sleep, the way you held your hand to make sure it was still steady, the direction my patients were laid out in. That was the important connection: patients were laid sideways as we cut them open, and if they saw anything, they saw it sideways; I'd always been upways, had only ever seen things in an upways way, had never considered that there could be a better ways than upways. All surgeons were like that, trapped within our upways ways, never bothering to just tip over and look at things from a different ways, so confident that our ways was the best of all the ways—

**Attention, attention all personnel: We sadly interrupt your dreams to bring you this nightmare, straight from the front lines. All medical personnel to the O.R.**

I sighed, releasing all my annoyance and confusion and anger in that little sound, and BJ and I got up and joined the slow flood into the O.R., into the world of sideways patients and upways doctors.

Hours later we walked back to the Swamp, our arms around each other's shoulders to keep ourselves steady. We paused outside the Swamp, looking down at the pillows and blankets we'd abandoned last night. I could hear the confusion in my voice, the uncertainty of a child, when I turned my head to BJ and said, "I got up."

"I noticed."

"I don't think I meant to."

"Do you want to lay back down?"

It was the same question—"Are you all right?"—just asked in a different way. I took a moment to consider it. Yes, Hancock—sideways-seeing Hancock—was dead. Dead because I'd fixed him enough, pulled him far enough up from sideways, that he could go back to the front. I'd just been doing my job, my blind upways job—there wasn't anything more I could have done those first four times Hancock was rolled sideways onto my table, and nothing I could have done different yesterday. I'd done all I could to bring the boy upways, because if you stayed sideways too long, you'd die. I'd done what I could for him, prayed I'd done enough that he'd last until he got his discharge papers. I'd done all I could, and it hadn't been enough. He'd been too sideways, and I'd been too upways.

"Hawk?" BJ asked tentatively.

Sideways was only a fleeting thing, something you could only peek at every once in a while, or it'd drive you just as mad as upways. "I'm human," I said softly. "I hate being reminded of that."

"We're all human here. We do the best we humanly can. No one could ask any more from us."

We stood there a while, still gazing down at our makeshift bed. A silent reminder of all the things we hadn't said. The things that sometimes didn't need to be said.

"Come on, Hawk. Let's go inside."

"Home sweet Hell."

"Home is where the gin is," he reminded me.

"You read my mind," I said, and led the way into the Swamp.


End file.
